April 30, 2016
It has been awhile…. I gave posting a low priority as I learned to deal more and more with a diagnosis of low vision. Never heard of it? Me either. Until I was diagnosed with it. Over the coming months, I will share how asking questions, ranging from my human resources’ representative at work to all kinds of eye doctors and finally a low vision specialist, attending low vision training with a representative from the Pennsylvania Office for the Blind, and coping with endless internal debates regarding my identity and life goals unfolded. For today, I will recall the first conversation with human resources. It came about because I asked for some accommodations at work. What I really wanted was to have my teaching assignments be in the same building that my office was in. Because winters are mostly quite snowy and icy in Pennsylvania, walking across campus under the best of circumstances can be challenging. When you can only see out of the central part of one eye…no vision in the other eye and no peripheral vision in the eye you are now depending on–it is downright scary. If I could not have classrooms to teach in located in my own building–which would be a challenge since the semester was underway–I wanted to pay a graduate student escort to assist me. That meaning having approval for resources. At any rate, I found myself making an appointment to see my human resources representative. I asked my husband to go with me. We appeared at the office and explained our reason for being there. We were told, “I have never dealt with this before… I have had some faculty–mostly elderly men–have trouble hearing in the classroom. More often than not, however, students rather than faculty made me aware of the situation…” Uh, how does this relate to me? I thought. I looked at John and he looked at me. “Do you have long term disability insurance?” the representative asked. I nodded. “Well, you might want to think about” and this is where things are a bit fuzzy–I don’t know if she said resigning, retiring, quitting–but some word that meant ‘ending my career’–“and go on disability insurance.”
Yeah. Not so much. First, I did not feel ‘disabled.’ I felt that so many things about my health were above par and surely there would be ways to assist me with what had become a challenge. I guess I was shaking my head ‘no’ or something because the representative was saying, “OK, well let me look into this….”
So many questions flooded into my frame of being that day. How many people are drawing disability because someone could not think outside the box in working with them? I would be interested in hearing from you
